Our long-term objective is to design nursing strategies to reduce stress for young hospitalized children and their parents, and to promote self-help behaviors leading to increased internal control in children and parents. The research questions are: (1) What are the effects of a tape-recorded story administered to hospitalized children at bedtime on sleep onset latency (SOL), and on the amount of distress and self-soothing behaviors of the children? What are the effects of a parent tape-recorded bedtime story for their hospitalized child and on the level of parent anxiety? Children's recovery from illness is maximized by the ability to obtain an optimum amount of sleep. In turn, an early recovery reduces parent anxiety. Therefore, establishing nursing strategies to promote hospitalized children's ability to soothe themselves to sleep sooner is a worthhwile endeavor. The proposed study is Phase 3 of a research program. Previous phases (completed and ongoing) identified eight clusters of children's behaviors during SOL, demonstrated the efficacy of a computer-compatible observational system, and established the usefulness of a wrist actigraph (a measure of activity) to confirm sleep onset. Phase 3 is a pretest-posttest four-group quasi-experimental research design. The sample will consist of 80 children, 36-108 months, and their parents. The hypotheses are: There is no difference in the length or nature of SOL among children, or level of parent anxiety under the conditions of hospitalized children who: (1) listen to a parent-recorded story, with parents absent (T1); (2) listen to a non-parent recorded story with parents absent (T2); (3) do not listen to a recorded story, with parents absent (C1); and (4) do not listen to a recorded story, with parents present (C2). Conditions 3 and 4 are set up as controls for the "treatments." Children will be observed on Nights 1 and 2, and their behaviors encoded into the computer-compatible keyboard. Activity of the children will also be measured by a wrist actigraph. Treatment measures will be introduced at bedtime on Night 2. Covariance analysis with the pretest measures as covariates will be used to determine the effects of the study treatment on (1) length of SOL; (2) amount of self-soothing and distress behaviors, and (3) level of parent anxiety. Also, ANOVA comparisons between groups on a number of variables will be done. Variables in which the groups are significantly different from each other will be used as covariates in an analysis of covariance.